Evening Ethics, 12/16/2021: The Holidays Ethics Avalanche Continues…

/ Jack Marshall / 18 Comments

Predictably, just when I have the least time, the most ethics issues, and important ones, are flying by. I know I’m going to miss some; I’m missed some already. Yesterday, for example, I neglected to note the anniversary of the 1791 ratification of the Bill of Rights, though plenty of readers reminded me. A more ethical historical document does not exist, and the Bill of Rights continues to bolster American values as well as delineate them. I should do a full post on the status of the document and its contents, which have seldom been so besieged. A “Bill of Rights Day” holiday would make much more sense than “Juneteenth,” other than its unfortunate placement so close to Christmas.

What else did I miss? On the 15th in 1998 we saw what might well be the last legitimate impeachment in U.S. history, since the Democrats so thoroughly abused and weakened the standards for the process in their quest to bring down Donald Trump. Whether Clinton should have been convicted in the Senate is a close call for me; he certainly should have had a real trial, which he did not. On balance, I believe his obstruction of the investigation, and especially his dishonesty before the grand jury, tilts the scale to conviction.

Today, the 16th of December, marks the 248th anniversary of The Boston Tea Party, when 60 allies of Samuel Adams’ radical resistance group dumped dumped 342 chests of tea worth about $18,000 (nearly $600,000 today) into the Boston Harbor to protest British taxes. The targeted economic riot was a catalyst: Parliament retaliated against the colonies by enacting the so-called Intolerable Acts, in 1774, closing Boston to merchant shipping, establishing formal British military rule in Massachusetts, declaring British officials immune to criminal prosecution in the Colonies, and requiring the colonists to quarter British troops (hence the Third Amendment in the Bill of Rights). The colonies responded with the first Continental Congress, and the rest, as they say, is history.

Just so you know what kind of public school teacher I would be, I’d assign students to compare and contrast the January 6, 2021 attack on the Capitol to Sam Adams’ little uprising.

1. What are schools for? The always provocative City-Journal reveals that a recent survey by YouGov and American Compass, asked 1,000 American parents with a child between the ages of 12 and 30 about what the priority for the public education system should be, phrased thusly: “Which is more important, helping students maximize their academic potential and gain admission to colleges and universities with the best possible reputations, or “helping them develop the skills and values to build decent lives in the communities where they live?” The latter prevailed by approximately a 2 to 1 margin.

As it should have…

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From The “I Don’t Understand This At All” Files

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

Slap

Kevin Clinesmith, a former senior FBI lawyer who was sentenced to 12 months probation last January after pleading guilty to a felony in connection with the falsified information used to acquire the FISA warrant used to surveil marginal Trump campaign figure Carter Paige in relation to the Trump-Russia investigation, was restored as a member in “good standing” by the District of Columbia Bar Association’s discipline committee.

Maybe there is a a good reason for this, but it seems very strange.

The Bar did not seek Clinesmith’s disbarment which lawyers convicted of felonies involving the justice system typically face. He has not even finished serving out his probation as a convicted felon. After the negative publicity about the apparently rigged FISA process (the objective was to “get Trum”), the bar temporarily suspended Clinesmith pending a review and hearing. In September, Clinesmith’s suspension was ended with time served and his status to “active member in good standing.”

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Oh Right! THAT’S Why I Quit Twitter…And Also Why We Can’t Trust The CDC [Correction Corrected!]

/ Jack Marshall / 38 Comments

The new regime at Twitter announced that it will begin punishing users who tweet that vaccinated people can spread the Wuhan virus.

“When tweets include misleading information about Covid-19, we may place a label on those tweets that includes corrective information about that claim,” the Twitter website says addressing pandemic “misinformation.“We may apply labels to tweets that contain, for example… false or misleading claims that people who have received the vaccine can spread or shed the virus (or symptoms, or immunity) to unvaccinated people.” Users who pass on such ‘lies” might receive a permanent ban.

[Notice of Correction : Okay, now I’ve got all the information. Twitter did a stealth edit even as I was writing the post. The original text DID say “virus,” as EA stated above. Yesterday Twitter changed the word to “vaccine,” which is ridiculous, and claimed that virus was a typo. I do not believe it was a typo. I believe that once various web sources pointed out the CDC contradictory statements, Twitter tried to save face by the “typo” excuse. It is also a stealth edit, as the page itself never acknowledges the change. After several commenters told me that I had wrongly published “virus” when Twitter had used “vaccine,” I assumed it was my mistake. It wasn’t. My original source was correct regarding what the new Twitter rules were at the time I wrote this post.]

This is interesting, because in June of this year, the CDC announced that “the vaccinated public” could “unknowingly transmit virus to others, including their unvaccinated or immunocompromised loved ones.”

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And The Latest Desperate Rationalization As Abortion Advocates Search For A Persuasive Argument To Justify Allowing Pregnant Women The Unilateral Right To End Another Human Being’s Life Is….

/ Jack Marshall / 9 Comments

Unborn children in heaven

…..this intellectually dishonest opinion piece by Kate Cohen in the Washington Post. It is titled “How would you feel if your mother had aborted you?’ Easy. I’d feel nothing,” and embodies several themes in the abortion-loving Left’s escalating freak-out over the very real possibility that Roe v. Wade will be overturned or limited by the current Supreme Court.

One theme is that that abortion advocates almost unanimously continue to avoid dealing with the other human party in the equation whose interests are at stake: the unborn human being. Another is using collateral attacks on religion and faith to minimize the belief by religious people that it’s wrong beyond question to kill an innocent individual for the benefit of a more powerful one. The third…

Well, let me address the second a bit again. Progressives are largely hostile to religion and the religious, whom they regard as unsophisticated, superstitious rubes. Since people tend to project their biases and attitudes on others, those who want open season on fetuses think they score points by linking the anti-abortion side of the debate to something they think is ridiculous. It is not a genuine argument but rather a cognitive dissonance trick. They are counting on a someone conflicted about the abortion debate being pulled to their side by the association with a different subject they regard with contempt. It is the same kind of tactic as using “The Handmaiden’s Tale” as a false map for the dystopian future abortion fans claim awaits if Roe goes down: linking abortion to something horrible, even a science fiction story, will diminish the appeal of the anti-abortion position, not with logic or reason, but with a negative association alone.

I have a difficult time not concluding that those using the anti-religion, association tactic are malign people because of their association with it. The belief that killing an innocent human being is wrong isn’t only a religious belief and bedrock moral tenet. It is basic ethics as well, a conclusion virtually all societies have accepted based on human experience. That’s where ethics comes from: one doesn’t have to be religious to strongly object to killing human beings, indeed religion isn’t necessary to reach that conclusion at all. Whether one reaches the position that legal abortion consists of one powerful human being who has had the opportunity to live ending that opportunity for a weaker human being for her own sole benefit and is therefore wrong, through religion, Kant, Rawls, basic ethical analysis, logic, common sense or some other path is irrelevant. You got there. Congratulations. It’s the ethical place to be.

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Comments On Another IIPTDXTTNMIAFB Classic

/ Jack Marshall / 19 Comments

Yes, President Biden really does seem to think the word is “expodentially.” Based on the way he uses it, the word the President means is “exponentially.” Now, normally I regard excessive attention being paid to an eccentric mispronunciation by a public figure as petty and unfair. Jimmy Carter famously pronounced “nuclear” as “nucular.” My father, an articulate and literate man, mispronounced “fiasco” as “fiesca” for some reason, no matter how many times I corrected him.

But if President Trump kept repeating a blatant mispronunciation of a word (for that matter if George W. Bush did) we would never hear the end of it. Comics like Stephen Colbert and Trevor Noah would beat the mockery into a pulp by overuse. This would be have been cited as proof that Trump is a moron. Proof that he never reads. Proof that he should be removed via the 25th Amendment. Remember “covfefe”? Trump tweeted that once, and it was obviously a typo. Never mind: he was mocked about it for weeks.

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Comment Of The Day: “The Police Traffic Stop Ethics Dilemma”

/ Jack Marshall / 14 Comments

Daunte-Wright-and-Kim-Potter

I am grateful to Humble Talent for authoring a more thorough consideration of the ongoing Kim Potter trial , in which a Minnesota ex-cop faces murder charges for fatally shooting young, black Daunte Wright behind the wheel of his vehicle when he appeared to be preparing to flee, placing a fellow officer in danger. She mistakenly drew her gun and fired it instead of her taser, and there is no dispute over whether this was an accident or not. It was. I believe that bringing murder charges against Potter was an abuse of prosecution discretion, and yet another instance of prosecutors letting public opinion and threatened violence dictate their decisions.

Here is Humble Talent’s Comment of the Day on the Kim Potter trial and the Daunte Wright case’s relevance to the post, “The Police Traffic Stop Ethics Dilemma”:

***

“Being pulled over for a broken taillight shouldn’t end in death. Too often, it does.”

I’ve followed this case since jury selection. And boy howdy this one has been dry… Some of the more interesting parts of this were probably the jury selection… by the third day of jury selection the state had used all their unqualified passes, so they had to let through a finance guy who LARPs with a battleaxe on the weekends and had some very pro-defense inclinations, as an example. There was also an ACAB activist who tried to lie to sneak onto the jury, but Earl Grey (the lawyer’s actual name) had scoured all the potential jurists social media feeds and fed her back quotes about how cops should be shot. The shock in the potential jurists voice and the immediate change in her demeanor was delicious.

And so I think that I’ve seen at least what the jury has in this case. The only thing they’ve kept from the feeds are the pictures of the deceased, and I’m pretty sure they’re doing that because Daunte’s pants slid off during first aid and they didn’t want his junk on primetime. Empathetically: Daunte was not shot over for a busted taillight.

He was pulled over because he had an air freshener hanging off the rearview. Apparently this is a ticketable offense in some jurisdictions. But I’m not sure that he actually would have been ticketed for the tree… Things like that are often pretenses to see if you can find more. And boy howdy, did they.

Before they got out of their car, for instance, they knew that the tags on the vehicle’s insurance was expired. When they interacted with Daunte, Daunte told them he didn’t have his license on him, but he gave them his name, date of birth, and some other information. The officers noted the strong smell of marijuana and saw some bud in the console. They went back to the car and were able to surmise a few things:

1) The car was not in fact insured. (They didn’t know this at the time, but it hadn’t been for years)
2) Daunte did not have a driver’s license. (They didn’t know this at the time, but he never had)
3) Daunte had an outstanding warrant for a weapons violation. (They didn’t know this at the time, but he tried to extort rent money out of a tenant at gunpoint.)
4) Daunte also had a restraining order out against him from his ex-girlfriend, and there was a female passenger in the car.
5) Marijuana is still fully illegal in Minnesota.

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Morning Ethics Warm-Up, 12/15/21: Denial, Deception, Devolution, Discipline And Delusion

/ Jack Marshall / 11 Comments

I would feel much better about the future of the country if Democrats and progressives would at least admit that the “anyone but Trump” President installed by the media with the assistance of some highly questionable voting procedures, along with the extreme pipe-dream policies that came along with Biden have been an unmitigated disaster. But they won’t; it’s amazing. Today’s New York Times letters section has a section called “Is Biden’s Presidency a Disappointment?” I would have answered, “No., because it was obvious that he would be terrible,” but that’s not what the Times readers think, no indeed. One wrote that he’s playing the hand he was dealt, and is “inspiring people to fight.” (“Inspiring people to fight” is what the Democrats in the House claimed justified impeaching him for causing “an insurrection”…) The next letter, which doesn’t appear to be from a madhouse, says “This has been an astonishingly successful 2021 so far.” It really does, and the Times printed it. The third letter says the writer is only disappointed that the Democrats under Biden haven’t “come together” sufficiently to prevent Republicans from “doing terrible damage to our country” because the GOP is clearly “bent on destroying democracy.” The responses end with a note of sanity, as J. Matthew McClone of Tyson Md. writes that a Times op-ed stating that there was a “growing fear” that the Republicans will gain power and “slam the doors of democracy behind them” confirms that “many on the left have lost perspective.”

Ya think?

1. Schadenfreude test! New York’s top ethics panel has ordered former Governor Andrew Cuomo to pay the state the $5.1 million in profits he made on a book celebrating his management of the Wuhan virus in New York. The book was a crock, since thousands of elderly New Yorkers died in nursing homes after Cuomo ordered them to accept contagious seniors. Over 9,000 coronavirus patients were sent into New York nursing homes by the “Luv Guv,”, and over 15,000 long-term care residents in New York’s nursing homes died, though Cuomo’s henchpeople did their best to cover it up. Yet none of that is why he has to pay back the money: the 12-to-1 vote by the Joint Commission on Public Ethics yesterday was based on its conclusion that Cuomo used state resources and government staff to write the book. Cuomo must pay the money to the state by next month.

Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy…

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When Ethics Alarms Don’t Ring: The South Dakota Teacher “Dash for Cash”

/ Jack Marshall / 5 Comments

‘Hey, how about this? Let’s make our underpaid school teachers scrounge for dollar bills on their knees to amuse the crowd! What do you think?’

Someone really said that, or something similar, in a team promotion brain-storming session for The Sioux Falls Stampede, a junior league hockey team in South Dakota. And apparently everyone loved the idea, because they did it! As what was advertised as the first of many”Dash for Cash” attractions between periods in their home games, the team dumped $5,000 in $1 bills on a carpet at center ice and invited ten hockey helmet-wearing teachers from local schools to fight for the bills as fans cheered the degrading spectacle….

Teachers cash

The teachers’ hauls ranged from $378 to $616.

Videos of the educators stuffing cash into their shirts and pockets spread on social media over the weekend, and the reaction was…not good.

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Casting Ethics And The Great Stupid: So William F. Buckley Was Black…I Did Not Know That!

/ Jack Marshall / 21 Comments

Buckley Vidal play

“The Best of Enemies” is a stage adaptation of the film about the 1968 TV face-offs between arch-conservative pundit William F. Buckley and acerbic liberal author and wit Gore Vidal that climaxed with Buckley threatening to punch Vidal is the face. I haven’t seen it (which is now playing in London’s West End) or the film: I was lucky enough to see the original, live. Buckley was fascinating (and often hilarious); Vidal was the perfect iconoclast (I even had a correspondence with him briefly!), so I assume both play and film are at least entertaining. That’s not the issue at hand, however.

The issue is casting ethics. My position as a director and also from the ethics perspective is that a production’s obligations are to the audience and the work being presented, and everything else is subordinate at best. That does not mean that I am opposed to so-called “non-traditional casting;” indeed, I support it (and have done a lot of it as a director) when it benefits the play or musical. When funky casting accomplishes nothing but making activists happy or ticking off woke boxes at the expense of the show’s effectiveness, that’s unethical, plain and simple.

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So Fox News Hosts Wanted President Trump To “Stop The Jan. 6 Riot”…So What?

/ Jack Marshall / 12 Comments

text messages

Why is this news? Why is this being used as evidence of anything by the partisan kangaroo court posing as a House select committee investigating the events of January 6? Text messages by Laura Ingraham, Brian Kilmeade and Sean Hannity were read aloud by Rep. Liz Cheney during last night’s hearing. Who cares?

“According to the records, multiple Fox News hosts knew the president needed to act immediately,” Cheney said. “They texted Mark Meadows, and he has turned over those texts.” Fox News propagandists Ingraham, Hannity and Brian Kilmeade all wanted Meadows to make some kind of exhortation to the rioters. Kilmeade, who co-hosts the nauseating “Fox & Friends,” called upon Meadows e to “please get him [that is, Trump] on TV” because the riot was “destroying everything you have accomplished.” Hannity wanted Trump to “make a statement” and “ask people to leave the Capitol.” “Mark, the president needs to tell people in the Capitol to go home,” host Laura Ingraham texted Meadows. “This is hurting all of us. He is destroying his legacy.”

Well…

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